What is the strategy for regime change in Iran and is it working?

0:00Today on State of the World, what is the strategy for regime change in Iran? And is it working? You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories, up close where they're happening. It's Tuesday, March 3rd. I'm Greg Dixon. Days after airstrikes by the U.S. and Israel killed Iran's supreme leader, Israel says it targeted the building where top Iranian clerics would meet to choose his successor. Israel's prime minister says the goal of this war is to get rid of the religious regime that has ruled Iran for almost half a century. And U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the U.S.

0:45had to join the attack because it knew Israel was about to strike. In a few minutes, we'll hear from inside Iran. First, to understand what is happening in the widening war in the Middle East, we're going to hear from two NPR correspondents. Aya Batraoui covers the region from Dubai, and Franco Ordonez covers the White House. They spoke to Scott Detrow. Hey, I'm going to start with you. What is the latest on this Israeli strike in Iran today? Sure. So Israel's military says it's targeted the building housing the Assembly of Experts. Now, that's the body of top Shiite clerics whose job it is to choose a new supreme leader.

1:21But it's unclear if the assembly was actually meeting at the time. It came right after Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the aim was to end the theocratic regime there. Now, meanwhile, also today, thousands of people in Iran gathered for the funeral of an elementary school that was struck, in which over 160 students, most of them young girls, were killed, according to Iran, as well as 14 teachers. Now, Iran's state TV had aerial footage of the huge gathering of mourners in the southern city of Minab, where the school was. That is the deadliest strike so far of this entire war. Now, Israel denies it hit the school.

1:54The U.S. military says it's looking into it. Iran says the school was hit Saturday morning just at the start of these attacks. And also, you know, with top leadership in Iran taken out in these strikes, what we know from Iran is that a three-man council is currently leading the country, and it's comprised of Iran's elected president and two top clerics. Okay, so Franco, now to you. We talked yesterday about how the justification for this war has shifted several times from the Trump administration. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said yesterday the U.S. followed Israel into the war. President Trump pushed back on that.

2:25What did he say? Yeah, it was actually the first time, Scott, that Trump answered questions on camera from the press since striking Iran. And that question about Israel leading the U.S. into war was the first one posed to him. And Trump forcefully rejected the idea, saying it was him who pushed Israel. I think they were going to attack first, and I didn't want that to happen. So if anything, I might have forced Israel's hand. Now, that, of course, is very different than what Rubio said yesterday. He told reporters that the U.S. faced an imminent threat because Israel was about to attack Iran and that Iran would have retaliated against U.S.

3:03forces in the region. I mean, those kind of comments led to a lot of criticism, particularly from the right, that Israel was bossing Trump around and leading the U.S. into war. And it just appears that the White House is trying to get back control of the narrative. But this idea that Iran was going to attack first, it's worth flagging. This is yet another new justification for the war, right? Yeah, it is. And I think that's part of the problem because the White House just has all these confusing mixed messages. I mean, Trump also pointed to the number of protesters being killed as rationale for going to war.

3:34He's also talked about the ballistic missile program and the threat against U.S. troops and allies in the region. And today, he said if they didn't do what they're doing right now, Iran would have started a nuclear war. Of course, as we've reported many times, this is the same program, nuclear program, that Trump said was obliterated a few months ago. Right. Eya, what can you tell us about the situation in Israel as well as the Gulf today, how Iran is trying to broaden this war? Well, we did see actually less strikes than we have since Saturday. and indications of that are that airspace has slowly started to open up again in the UAE as well as in Israel and flights are slowly starting to resume again from these two countries.

4:16But we did see the U.S. embassies in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait hit in the past 24 hours and a drone also sparked a fire at the U.S. consulate in Dubai. We are also seeing several U.S. embassies in the region just shutting down and the State Department advising U.S. citizens to leave more than a dozen countries in the Middle East. Now, Iran says its target is U.S. assets and bases in the region where soldiers are. But, you know, its attacks have hit vital infrastructure and civilian infrastructure across the Gulf, including Qatari gas installations. And that shut down that country's gas production entirely.

4:47And you saw gas prices soar by 35 percent in Europe. Also, the Strait of Hormuz is still effectively shut down. That's where all of the Gulf's oil passes through to the rest of the world. And that has been shut down and ships aren't moving in and out of that at all. Okay, Franco, I want to go back to you about what else President Trump is saying here. Did he give any more indication about what comes next or what America would like to see when it comes to who leads Iran next? Yeah, when asked by reporters who he'd like to take over, he said most of the people that they had in mind were dead. I mean, Trump actually made kind of a comparison with Iran, Iran and Venezuela, that operation where the swooped in and captured President Nicolas Maduro.

5:25He noted how they kept the government pretty much intact in order to main control and kind of prevent the kind of chaos created by the power vacuum during the Iraq war. But again, he said most leaders are dead. He said even their backup options may be dead. And he acknowledged some of the concerns may be that even a more dangerous person than the supreme leader could come to power, calling that a worst case scenario. All right. So lastly, Aya, given all of that, what are the concerns about what's next in the region? Well, you know, you're seeing Hezbollah and Israel trade fire. That, you know, hasn't happened for 15 months.

5:59And a ceasefire was mostly Israel just pounding southern Lebanon from time to time. But now we're seeing the death toll in Lebanon surpass 90 people in just the last 48 hours and thousands of people there displaced. But one attack mostly overlooked was a water tank belonging to a power plant was struck yesterday in Qatar. And that really is the Gulf's biggest fear that attacks on power plants or water desalination could paralyze countries here. You know, these are desert cities that would be paralyzed by that. But, you know, the bigger question is how much longer are Gulf Arab countries going to sit and take these hits from Iran before their own warplanes are flying over Iran or they start launching missiles back?

6:34And that would turn this into a much larger destabilizing region-wide war. That is NPR's Aya Batrawi in Dubai and NPR's White House correspondent Franco Ordonez here in Washington. Thank you so much to both of you. Thank you. Thanks. We're going to hear from inside Iran now. In announcing the U.S. attacks, President Trump called on Iranian security forces to defect. And he called on the Iranian people to, quote, take over your government. NPR's Ruth Sherlock has been talking to people in Iran to find out how they're feeling. Airstrike after airstrike in the capital, Tehran, and in cities across Iran.

7:12attacks that in these few days have already killed top Iranian officials and the country's supreme leader Ali Khamenei. The killings prompted outpourings of despair from his supporters, but also for some in Iran, a visceral relief. Last night, we screamed so hard from the windows that I don't have a voice anymore. Shadi in Tehran tells NPR. She, like other Iranians in this story, asked not to be identified with her full name, fearing arrest by the regime for speaking with Western media. I screamed, Khamenei is killed. I was shouting from the bottom of my heart, from the depths of my diaphragm, she says.

8:03A woman in a wheelchair who asked NPR to remain anonymous decided on the night of Khamenei's death that she just had to dance A video she posted on Instagram shows her swirling her wheelchair round and around on a zebra crossing of a busy street I don't know what will happen tomorrow, she wrote in the caption but tonight the most beautiful dance was mine

8:32As the bombs fall, there is panic too And in this sudden war, civilians are scrambling for the basics For the past two days, people have been trying to secure supplies Such as flour, bread, cooking oil, fuel and other essentials Kaveh, a 23-year-old student from Tabriz, tells NPR

8:57People are worried, he says. Schools and hospitals have been hit. And relatives of detainees in Tehran's notorious Evin prison, which also holds six Americans, say it's been taken over by Iranian special forces and that food for prisoners is scarce. President Trump has called on Iran's Revolutionary Guard forces, police and army to defect. I say tonight that you must lay down your weapons. It's a critical part of Trump's plan. No regime has been ousted through air power alone. But so far, says Ross Harris, senior fellow with the Middle East Institute, the regime appears to be holding. The regime is built for attacks from within and from outside.

9:42In the Islamic Republic's 47-year history, he says, it's learned from the Iranian revolution that overthrew the country's monarch and the Iran-Iraq war, how regimes can be toppled. So they built it institutionally in a very complex, very resilient way in terms of multiple institutions. So the supreme leader was the head, but think about the system as sort of a pyramid. And there are multiple institutions that overlap with one another. In this fluid situation, Harris says, things can change very quickly. But for now, it appears the Iranian regime is bedded in for a protracted conflict. That was NPR's Ruth Sherlock.

10:30That's the State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening.